Archive::Extract is a generic archive extraction mechanism. This module has a
similar interface to Archive::Extract, but instead of using Perl modules and
external commands, it uses the libarchive C libary
(<http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/>), which you must have installed
(libarchive-dev package for Debian/Ubuntu). It supports many different archive
formats and compression algorithms and is fast.

For example, unpacking the whole of CPAN using this module is about ten times
faster than using Archive::Extract.